


Never Never

by elfin



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 21:17:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12713139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elfin/pseuds/elfin
Summary: The night after they're reunited and promptly arrested, Dirk and Todd have a heart to heart.





	Never Never

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS for Season 2, up to episode 5

He was crying. I could hear him from my bunk. Sunshine weeping is not supposed to happen. Leaning over the edge, I whispered his name into the semi-darkness and watched as he curled up even tighter.

‘Hey….’ With care I dropped down from my bed to the cold floor and perched on the edge of Dirk’s bunk. He doesn’t really do physical contact, I’ve learnt from experience that touching him when he isn’t expecting it can result either in a slap or a punch if he’s taken by surprise, but more usually in him hurting himself trying to get away from it.

His eyes were open, red and puffy, but he wasn’t looking at me.

‘It was… just a nightmare,’ he muttered. I had to strain to hear him. ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

‘Sorry you….’ That was enough. I put my hand gently on his arm. ‘Come on. Sit up.’ I heard him swallow, thought he was going to argue with me, but since his return, since we found him, our roles had been reversed. I was the one certain of my place in the universe, and he was the unsure of everything. He moved, sat up, but tried to make himself as small as possible, as if trying to take up no more space than he absolutely had to. I shifted back onto the bed next to him, one leg tucked under me so I was facing him. ’You know you can talk to me, right? I know that last two months can’t have been easy. I’m sorry I unloaded on you before. That wasn’t fair.’

I saw his shoulders hitch and knew he was still crying. It almost broke my heart and I couldn’t stay apart from him any longer, couldn’t not offer some sort of comfort. Very, very carefully I put my hand on his shoulder, and very, very slowly I moved my arm around him. I moved into him instead of pulling him against me, stopped when his arm was pressed against me. 

‘It’s okay to cry.’

Our height difference made it so that I couldn’t rest my head on his, so I rested my cheek against his hair and held him while he finally let go. Two months of imprisonment at the hands of Blackwing; I couldn’t imagine what that freak Freidkin had put him through. 

‘I kept failing,’ he said after a long time, ‘day after repetitive day. It doesn’t work that way, my… powers aren’t even powers. I can’t… summon them, things just happen in the way they’re supposed to. I can’t sit in a room and predict a random shuffle of cards. I can’t defuse a bomb.’ It didn’t make sense entirely, but then very little of what he’d ever said to me did at the time he said it. ‘Every time I failed I was punished.’ I felt suddenly cold. ‘I mean… not really punished. Not… beaten or starved but… electrocuted or blasted in the face with foul-smelling paint…. Silly really….’

‘Two months of constant testing and punishment is not silly. It’s not nothing.’

‘The days were bad but the nights… the nights were worse. Every time I slept… I dreamt of you, and Farah, rescuing me. Every way, every possible way, night after night. And every morning I woke up and the whole thing started over again. I started to think… it would never end. I don’t want that to be my life. That’s not a life.’

The idea of Dirk, of everyone like him, being locked up, locked away, held captive when he flew so beautifully when he was free…. It wasn’t surprising that he was how he was; constant, frenetic energy, an energiser bunny of constant movement. Free flowing ideas given human form. 

He’s beautiful. It struck me like a hammer blow.

His tears subsided. He pulled away and I let him, but only enough so he could turn to face me. Not that he said anything, not at first. He hesitantly rested his forehead against mine. 

‘You remember when I told you I was always alone?’

‘Yes.’ I will remember that speech as long as I live. I nodded against him, closed my eyes and savoured the warmth I felt with him touching me. 

‘Worse than being back there was being back there and knowing what I was missing, knowing what it feels like to have a friend, and to be taken away from them.’

I had to try very hard not to cry a little myself. ‘I missed you too. I searched, we searched. I would have searched for the rest of my life.’ Searching blindly between us, I found his hands and held them. He returned the contact with surprising strength. ‘I will always find you.’

He choked on a laugh, but it was a happy sound. ‘I… I love you, Todd. I don’t know what that means exactly. But I think it means this, this feeling that I’m feeling right now.’

His fingertips were restless against the palms of my hands but I wouldn’t have expected anything different. This was possibly the longest I’d ever known him sit still. ‘I love you too, Dirk. You’re the best thing to ever happen to me. You were right, in the hotel, when you told your past self I was going to be your best friend. But then, you’re always right eventually, aren’t you?’

‘I think so.’ Not a brag but a weight, pressing so heavy on those narrow shoulders. I could understand how worn out he must have felt.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been pressuring you to have the answers. I know you don’t, but I know you’ll find them.’

‘With your help.’ He sounded just a little stronger, a little more like the Dirk Gently who climbed through my window and declared he was my new roommate, that first time I laid eyes on him.

I lifted one hand slowly and stroked the side of his head with my thumb, just at his hairline, waited for him to relax into the touch before sliding my fingers into his hair, the soft strands falling against my skin.

Being with him made me feel invincible. For all he worried about putting my life in danger, I knew I’d walk to the edge of any cliff with him at my side, jump off if it would save him. It’s why I felt brave enough to say, ‘I would really like to kiss you.’ I felt him tense and I could have kicked myself. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have….’

He lifted his head just slightly, away from mine. ‘It’s not…. I’ve never…. No one’s ever….’ He swallowed, raised his eyes to look at me and I got it, but I didn’t believe it.

‘Never?’

‘My life hasn’t exactly been full of opportunities for… that.’

‘But you’re…..’ Eminently kissable, I was going to say.

‘I’m an annoying, irritating asshole, according to you.’ There was no venom in his words. He rounded them off with a chuckle.

‘You can be… a little intense sometimes. But you’re not an asshole. You’re absolutely not a monster.’ That was another on the long list of things I regret ever saying. ‘You should never, never be alone.’

His eyes filled again, but I want to think it was happiness. ‘I… would really like it if you’d kiss me.’

I tilted my head, leaned in and touched my lips to his. When he didn’t bolt, didn’t tense, didn’t laugh, I traced the curve of his mouth with the tip of my tongue. He shivered, moaned, and parted his lips. A fast learner, my Dirk. He ventured a hand on to my hip but didn’t move beyond that. I think he was waiting for permission, but I wasn’t sure. He hadn’t waited for permission to crash into my life and turn everything I ever knew upside down. Or maybe I had given him permission, by being with the future Dirk back in the past. Yeah, that still sounds insane and I was there.

When I sat back slightly, he pulled back too, unsure of himself again, head down. 

‘Hey. Dirk.’ Big, wet eyes looked at me from under those long lashes; pleading. 

‘Was that….?’

‘Perfect. It was perfect.’

He sighed with what sounded a lot like relief, and looked down at his own lap with an expression that I had to almost bite through my tongue not to laugh at, but with affection. Always with affection. 

‘Dirk?’

He looked directly at me. ‘I don’t have a lot of experience.’ There was so much meaning in his words I felt like I might drown if I tried to work it out.

Scooting back, I lay down with my back against the wall. ‘Come on.’

He got the idea, lay down too, on his side, facing me. I could feel his erection against my leg and he must have been able to feel mine. But we both studiously ignored it for the time being. When he kissed me again, taking the lead this time, I felt like singing. I got my fingers back into his hair, keeping the touch gentle, and my other hand on his waist, fingertips just slipping into the waistband of the jumpsuit he was still wearing. 

‘That’s… so nice,’ he whispered when we came up for air. ‘I can understand why people like to do it so much. I… I had no idea you wanted to do it with me. You’ve spent a lot of our friendship so far hating me.’

‘It’s a fine line between love and hate.’

‘I don’t want you to hate me. When you hate me, it hurts.’

‘I know.’ I hated myself for what I’d said on the pier, for every word, each one chosen for the impact they’d have. ‘I promise, I won’t ever hate you again.’ I kissed the end of his nose and he beamed at me. ‘So… if you’ve never kissed, have you ever….’

He blushed, a perfectly lovely shade of red that was obvious even in the dim light making its way through the dirty glass of the high set windows. 

‘Not exactly. I mean… I know the basics, obviously. But, that…. Todd… I thought you and Farah….’

‘Once. We got drunk, or… she got me drunk because I couldn’t find you and I was losing hope. We ended up making out like teenagers behind a bar…. But that’s all. It was never love at first sight.’ I couldn’t stop touching his hair, although… ‘Please stop putting… whatever you’re putting in this.’

‘Don’t change the subject. I would rather share you, if I have to, than not have you at all.’

‘I told you. Farah and I are just friends. It just took you being taken from me to admit to myself how much you’d come to mean to me. You don’t have to share me.’

Tentative fingertips brushed the side of my throat and his eyes once again filled with tears he desperately tried to blink away. ‘I seem to cry a lot around you.’

‘We do seem to have an emotional relationship.’ Again, I remembered the pier, both of us in tears and it was all my fault. ‘But these are happy tears, right? Not sad ones.’ Not like before.

‘Yes, oh, yes, they’re happy ones, Todd. You have my word.’

‘I don’t know what I did to deserve you, why the universe decided I, of all people, deserved to be your assis-friend,’ his breath hitched on a sob but he was smiling like the sun coming out, ‘but I will be eternally grateful that it did.’

Dirk’s hand tightened on my arm and I watched as he squeezed his eyes shut. ‘Could you… please stop talking? Just for a while? Everything you’re saying…. No one’s ever been this nice to me before and I’m… not equipped to deal with it.’

Truth be told, I wasn’t equipped either, to deal with the overwhelming love and the heartbreaking little glimpses I kept getting into his past. Sliding one arm between the hollow of his neck and the pillow, I got my arms around him and shifted up the bed as he got with the program and shifted down. He wriggled his arms around my waist and snuggled up until he was as close to me as he could be, clinging to me.

The last thing I heard him say was, ‘I’m not very good with people,’ then, ‘please don’t let go,’ before he fell silent and his whole body finally relaxed into sleep.


End file.
